We deeply appreciate the members of the Rewire community who take time to comment on the many reproductive health and rights issues covered here. Since the inception of this publication several years ago we have always permitted and indeed encouraged a vigorous and open debate from any and all perspectives in the comments sections of our published articles. Until now we have allowed almost complete freedom for readers to comment. With the exception of the most inflammatory comments we have rarely intervened, believing that, for many reasons, it is important for all voices to be heard on these issues and that those who spread misinformation should be made known to and fully vetted by the public. We have, however, reached a point where we believe some commenters are repeatedly abusing commenting privileges to the detriment of the quality of conversation and debate. With the urging of many dedicated readers we have decided to become more proactive and have, therefore, updated our commenting policy:

Rewire is an unapologetically pro-choice publication, and the majority of our readers supports the struggle for sexual and reproductive rights, health, and justice.  We realize that some of our readers and commenters do not support these goals.  We embrace and encourage vigorous debate and civil discourse on the site and welcome comments representing diverse points of view that are evidence-based and reasonably engage the debate.  We reserve the right to delete, without further explanation, comments that misrepresent evidence or promote misinformation, that threaten or demean others, undermine the civility of discussion or seek to divert conversation from the topic of the original article .  We reserve the right to ban users who repeatedly abuse commenting privileges.

We will more concertedly remove comments that we find violate this policy and notify the offending commenters by email that their comment has been removed and commenters who are repeatedly in violation will be banned from commenting.

We are working on adding improved community moderation tools to the comment sections that will give you, our readers, the ability to rate comments and more control over what comments are shown to you. For now you can help us by clicking the “report” link at the bottom of comments that you deem violate our commenting policy.

Please share any thoughts on commenting in the comments below!